Verizon Hall

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT VERIZON HALL - PAGE 3

The three annual Curtis Symphony Orchestra concerts are always sizzling programs with talented young musicians giving their all in their big Kimmel Center outing. For this season's opener, British conductor James Judd leads these remarkable players in Edward Elgar's reminiscences of an Italian trip, "In the South" (subtitled "Alassio"), as well as Ravel's masterpiece of mood, the "Mother Goose" suite. Brahms' Fourth Symphony is the soaring finale. Before the concert, Curtis will bestow its 2010 alumni award to the members of the Guarneri Quartet, not only for their longtime supremacy but also for their leadership as Curtis faculty.

Music Gil Scott-Heron. He made a triumphant return to recording this year with the wryly titled I'm New Here, a short, sharp postmodern blues album that is the 1970s soul-funk-jazz-R&B- griot-and-rap-godfather's first album in 16 years. The satiric and socially conscious 61-year-old songwriter did not get to put those songs across to Philadelphians in person, however, because his scheduled February appearances at the Tin Angel were scuttled by two-plus feet of snow. He'll be back this weekend to make up the dates.

Russell Johnson, 83, the acclaimed acoustician who designed sound for the homes of many of the world's great orchestras - including Philadelphia's - died Tuesday in New York City, his firm announced. Mr. Johnson, widely admired for his work on orchestra halls in Dallas; Lucerne, Switzerland; and, perhaps most of all, Birmingham, England, died at his apartment after working Monday at his firm, said Tateo Nakajima, Artec Consultants' managing director. "We were discussing design ideas and planning for the future," Nakajima said, "and as far as we can tell, he went home from work and just didn't wake up. " Mr. Johnson founded his design studio in 1970 in New York but was more often seen listening to concerts in Miami, Singapore, or one of the dozens of other cities in which he designed halls.

In terms of bullying incursions of modern life, the Philadelphia Orchestra's new program-note app ranks somewhere between leaf blowers and fruit stickers. Which is to say that for someone somewhere, life is probably better for having these advances around, but the rest of us don't have to be happy about it. In reality, I wasn't disturbed by LiveNote, which had its debut Tuesday at the orchestra's annual free concert for college students. As the ensemble played Rimsky and Bernstein, listeners with iPhones could toggle between streams of information, either about the piece and composer, and what the app calls "analysis" - not harmonic analysis, but something much more basic.

Philly trombonist Jeff Bradshaw will gather his best friends Wednesday night - including vocal group Take 6 and fellow specialist Trombone Shorty - for HOME , a live recording session, with 10-piece band and strings, on the stage of the Kimmel's Verizon Hall. Bradshaw, 44, is confident but also humble for a guy who has traveled the world with Jay Z and played on albums for Michael Jackson, Mary J. Blige, and Philly luminaries like Marsha Ambrosius and the Roots. Bradshaw was raised at the Cambridge Mall housing project at 12th and Girard Streets.

The Kimmel Center's grand opening 10 years ago was a model of how not to do it. The performing arts center was so far from finished in its opening week that at one concert musicians gamely wore hard hats. Verizon Hall's out-of-control air-conditioning led bejeweled patrons at the opening gala to joke about seeing indoor snow flurries. The acoustics inhabited the opposite end of the weather index: The Washington Post's critic called the hall "an acoustical Sahara. " "You ask, 'My gosh, why wasn't this done right the first time around?

The cost of hearing the Philadelphia Orchestra will jump next season by an average of 16 percent - the biggest increase since 1987. In addition, the ticket surcharge will double to $2 per ticket. A small number of ticket prices will stay the same or even drop slightly. But most listeners will pay substantially more, depending on seat location, to experience the orchestra live in the future. The increase comes as the orchestra prepares to become a tenant in a new hall that will be both more expensive to operate and will offer fewer seats than the Academy of Music.

Could it be that the era of taking Wolfgang Sawallisch for granted is coming to an end? Whether or not a groundswell of adoration rises this season, the Sawallisch era itself is now officially in the homestretch. The Philadelphia Orchestra's music director presided over his last opening night Wednesday, acting in his usual music-first, ego-last way, as if nothing were different. But everything is different, and more change is on the way - soon. The orchestra's still-new hall sounded better than it did at the end of last season, the result, perhaps, of a new riser configuration and more layers of sound-reflective polyurethane on the stage of Verizon Hall (four coats, as opposed to two)

Whatever else you think of Christoph Eschenbach's interpretive leanings, his good ideas about shedding the veneer of pretentiousness that stubbornly clings to orchestras, or his cooperative attitude about fund-raising, it cannot be said that he is developing a close rapport with the musicians of the Philadelphia Orchestra. How could it be turning out differently? This was the music director imposed on, not chosen by, the players. Eschenbach hadn't conducted here in years when he was hired.

The return of the Philadelphia Orchestra's conductor laureate Wolfgang Sawallisch and two internationally famous violinists tops this week's slate. Sawallisch is back to lead Dvorak's eight buoyant Slavonic Dances, Op. 72, and the Beethoven Violin Concerto, featuring the brilliant Greek-born violinist Leonidas Kavakos. This is an ideal program for these two master musicians (8 tonight, tomorrow and Tuesday, Verizon Hall, Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Broad and Spruce streets, $9-$69.